In the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), the fourth generation (4G) cellular network includes a radio access network (e.g., referred to as a long term evolution (LTE) network) and a wireless core network (e.g., referred to as evolved packet core (EPC) network). The LTE network is often called an evolved universal terrestrial radio access network (E-UTRAN). The EPC network is an all-Internet protocol (IP) packet-switched core network that supports high-speed wireless and wireline broadband access technologies. The EPC network allows user equipment (UEs) to access various services by connecting to the LTE network, an evolved high rate packet data (eHRPD) radio access network (RAN), and/or a wireless local area network (WLAN) RAN. The EPC network is a complex system that includes a number of network nodes that communicate with each other when UEs are accessing the EPC network. An evolved packet system (EPS) is defined to include both the LTE and EPC networks. EPS seeks to improve mobile technology through higher bandwidth, better spectrum efficiency, wider coverage, enhanced security, and full interworking with other access networks.
A network outage of the EPC network may be catastrophic to a telecommunications provider. For example, if both active and redundant packet data network (PDN) gateways (PGWs) of the EPC network fail, hundreds of thousands of UEs may be disconnected from the EPC network at the same time. Such a situation may create a tsunami-like event where all of the disconnected UEs attempt to reconnect to the EPC network at the same time and create a message surge that eventually overloads a re-authentication and reauthorization device (e.g., a home subscriber server (HSS)) of the EPC network. Authentication is one of the first steps that is performed when UEs are attempting to connect to the EPC network. The connecting UEs send signaling to mobility management entities (MMEs) of the EPC network, and the MMEs, in turn, send the signaling to the HSS for authentication of the UEs. During a message surge, MMEs may be able to sustain the large amount of UEs sending authentication requests at the same time. The HSS, however, may not be able to handle the large amount of authentication requests and may become overloaded. Once the HSS is overloaded, the connecting UEs may not receive service and connected UEs may lose service.
The 4G version of the EPC network may include network nodes that require significantly less space and power requirements than second generation (2G) circuit switched network nodes. The 4G network nodes may be designed to handle millions of UEs while occupying a small amount of space. However, standardization of the 4G version of the EPC network did not consider failure scenarios, such as the example scenario presented above. Thus, the 4G version of the EPC network remains susceptible to catastrophic network failures.